Why do you hate Mr. C?

Several years ago, on one summer night, some object, quite big and black, flew into my room from a window left open. He flew directly near me making a bee line, or even faster, and he perched on my leg. I was working on the computer with my legs crossed. Almost instantaneously, at the moment when I felt some little stimulus on my upper leg (usually right one), my function of agility worked and raised the leg as if I had wanted to kick something, screaming. My agility function ordered me to go and get a weapon for an execution and I did it. I sprayed insecticide in the direction where the black object was gone. Quite much. Longer than I should have. A “peace” returned to my room with a smell of the insecticide, just like a smell of gunpowder of a machine gun.

After a while, before going to bed, I was stirred to go and recover the remain to clean up. I searched for it with a heap of tissue paper in my hand, but what I found in the shade was not what I had expected… It was a beetle with a horn, a rhinoceros beetle which is so popular that some people want to pay for it!

A sense of guilt occurred to me… I killed such a cute and precious rhinoceros beetle… even more, he was innocent. Maybe he flew away from a cage by mistake and he came into my room without knowing where to go. A boy who had owned him might have kept crying at night for the loss… It was a painful feeling of guilt.

“Kabutomushi-JapaneseBeetle-July2004″ by Gombe(talk / Contributions) at the Japanese Wikipedia – File:Kabutomushi-JapaneseBeetle-July2004.jpg from the Japanese Wikipedia. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons -

But, if it had been the one that I had expected..? This strong feeling of guilt would not have occurred to me, I think. As a matter of fact, my reaction to cockroaches are always decisively one. I have had no mercy on them. Why??

Many kinds of products are sold in the market, from the aggressive weapons to the passive traps. But all of them are made for the common purpose; for the extermination.

This is a long selling product in Japan from 1973 of Earth Chemical. Maybe more than 96% of the Japanese know its name. I didn’t know that this product is exported to other countries under the same name “HOY HOY”. I guess many non-Japanese don’t know the meaning of hoy-hoy or hoi-hoi. Basically it is a shout used for calling cows or horses. But the usage and the meaning are stretched to an adverb which qualifies people’s action of accepting an invitation or an offer without thinking.

Why are cockroaches hated so much? I understand why I want to kill mosquitoes as much as possible. It is because my skin becomes itchy if I get bitten by mosquitoes. That can be defined as an act of self-defense. On the other hand, cockroaches have never done any harm to me although it is said that they carry out germs. I don’t leave any leftovers on the table or in the kitchen for long, and I put dishes in a cupboard. So I think the risk they carry is kept low as possible. Even though…. I am driven to kill them almost automatically. That’s terrible.

Do we, human beings, have something negative in DNA level against cockroaches, just like domestic birds are frightened with snake-like objects even though they’ve never seen any snakes?

To solve this question, I have asked some people why they hate cockroaches. I could easily imagine that most people would answer simply as, “Because they are gross.”, so I had prepared another question, “What aspect of cockroaches do you find gross?”

Here are some aspects that make people hate them:

Colour: black, black and shiny

Shape: flat

Action: to move quick, to appear suddenly, to fly

Image: filthy, unhygienic

Alright. Then, imagine a cockroach which have other colours, brighter colours, such as pink or white, or even with a polka-dot… Its’ shape round and moves slow…

Do you still hate them?

a red with polka-dot and round-shaped insect which has a very elegant name as ‘Ladybird’

Photo by Navis Argenti

If you are courageous enough to see beautiful coloured roaches, go and visit these sites. If you are not, just imagine!

How about them?? But the remaining problem of hygienic issue, let’s imagine that we have some chemicals to disinfectant them.

How about that?

Through this small research, I found a very interesting point. Many people said that they don’t find a cockroach so gross if they see it outside and it doesn’t disturb them as a snake, a spider, a hornet, or even a mosquito. The problem was that a cockroach invades our territory, “home”. Thus the biggest reason of our desire for the automatic execution can be defined as the defenses on the border.

Then, why did I feel so guilty after having killed a rhinoceros beetle which invaded my territory without any prenotice?? Some explained to me like this;

Imagine that someone appears from nowhere suddenly in front of you. How will you react to ‘someone’ and how will you feel if ‘someone’ is a beautiful and good looking man / woman? Then how will you feel if ‘someone’ is ugly and filthy looking? Can you say that your reaction will be the same?? Are you sure that a beautiful looking man / woman will not do any harm to you?

I found that this hypothesis was to the very point. We are too biased by our prejudice, which is very difficult to wipe out. As the information that we get from the eyesight is important and too predominant, we sometimes don’t use our brain to act adequately, and we become irrational.

I am not so sure that I can act rationally when I find cockroaches next time. But I am sure that I have become rational enough to consider that they have more experience on the earth than human beings do. The earliest cockroach-like fossils are from the Carboniferous period, 354–295 million years ago, and the first fossils of modern cockroaches appeared in the early Cretaceous, 145–66 million years ago. I think we should realize that we are not the king of the earth. Granted that we had taken the throne of the earth, we should be a good king. Otherwise, a revolution will break out by other species. It will be very difficult to solve this problem since there still remain many kinds of prejudice even among human beings… Recently we have been suffering from earthquakes, floods, landslides, hurricanes, typhoons, and highly contagious viral diseases… I just hope that they are not the revolution against human beings by the nature.

The total number of species on Earth is variously estimated to be between 5 and 50 million or more. Only about 1.8 million have actually been described, however, and a good guess is that between 75 and 90 per cent of the Earth’s species are still to be named — and that’s not even including the bacteria. In the Animal Kingdom alone between 15,000 and 20,000 new species are named each year.
Backyardnature.net

If you want to know more about insects, or if you want to get more familiar with them, go and visit our site, “2 Hours Drive From Tokyo“, to read the new article regarding a fun on Insect-Catching.

Google Adsense

Comment

Good points. I had a giant cockroach fly into my apartment in Akita and perch on the fusuma. I was Skyping with hubby (at the time only bf) and immediately started freaking out. How was I going to get it out?! Hubs gave me great advice but I still had to deal with it. Yuck! In Thailand, we had scorpions, a centipede that bit and enormous spiders in our house. Yes, they were better outside! I’m not sure if them being a different color would have helped!

Hitoshi found a picture online of a giant can of roach spray. I was not going to go roach spray shopping at 11pm so I somehow corraled C-sama into the kitchen and killed it but then Hitoshi yelled, don’t kill it inside! There will be babies everywhere! So then I got it outside and scrubbed the floor with bleach. Blech!
There was a gorgeous deep red HUGE roach in hub’s family home kitchen one summer. It was really late at night and I’d gone in to get something and there it was on the counter. Ewww! I wasn’t fast enough to spray it. Despite its beautiful color, I still wasn’t thrilled to see it. Luckily I’m good at forgetting about buggies in the house!